Driving through Forlorn Oakland the other day -- turn left at Foreplay Oakland (man, the one-way Raging Hormone Lanes are brutal), turn right at Forboding Oakland and you're there -- the thought struck home.

Bill Walsh, the Original Genius, was right.

Not the "sooo forlorn" part about Oakland, a Monday statement that made him sound like a narly septuagenarian Valley Guy from Cali. Not the "hopeless" part about University of Pittsburgh football.

Rather, what Walsh, and the ex-coach's ex-agent Bob LaMonte before him, correctly nailed was the sentiment of the rest of college football America about the little program that Walt Harris helped to revive: This just might be as good as Pitt gets.

For Football Oakland, 7-4 and 8-3 is it.

That next level to which everyone around here breathlessly aspires? It's an occasional 9-2. And maybe the Panthers can attain a 10-1 once every five years. If they're really lucky. And the Mon don't rise.

Face it, live-in-the-past Pittsburgh, this isn't the 1970s and 1980s anymore.

For starters, the recruiting base is no longer present to support a Johnny Majors team that gave out 75 scholarships in a single winter (before rule changes) and among them landed a Tony Dorsett. It is no longer fertile enough to buttress the Mississippi and Florida players Jackie Sherrill crafted into 33-3 teams that included 21-plus future NFL starters and four College Football Hall of Famers.

Michigan this season has pieced together a nice little club from Western Pennsylvania guys, with Steve Breaston, Marlin Jackson, Scott McClintock and Ryan Mundy. Which only goes to show that if you corner the market in this corner of the state, you can be 8-3 and 9-2 regularly, 10-1 in a maize-and-blue moon. But the soil here ain't as rich as it used to be, especially for linemen -- the only recent WPIAL player making much of a dent on a starting NFL front attended, of all places, Clarion (Reggie Wells).

This clay still sprouts the rare LaVar Arrington. Emphasis on rare. To wit, Western Pennsylvania in general and Pitt in particular have produced five first-round draftees the past baker's-dozen years: Larry Fitzgerald, Arrington, Ty Law, Ruben Brown and Sean Gilbert. In the same period prior, 1979-91, there were 17. Demographics tell that tale. Pittsburgh was the No. 6 U.S. market in the 1980s. It's No. 21 now.

Another problem for Pitt is the modern-day recruit. To him, tradition goes back a decade, max. Yes, children, that Dan Marino you see on television had a real job before that. Pitt's 1976 title, albeit the school's only one the past 67 years, is lost among Southern California, LSU, Ohio State, Miami, Oklahoma, Florida State, Tennessee and ... how did they name a national champion before the BCS, daddy?

Walsh's view from Palo Alto and the Stanford campus known as The Farm was jaded long before Harris arrived Monday. But the Original Genius Who Even Taught Brian Billick and LaMonte, Harris' mouthy old agent, were almost spot-on in their assessment that Pitt isn't quite as exalted a head-coaching position as folks here believe. Pitt's facilities are grand, but other programs aren't exactly stuck in the 1980s. A sampling of better places to succeed, from someone who has seen almost all of them:

Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, Iowa, LSU, Miami, Michigan, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Penn State, Southern California, Tennessee, Texas, Texas A&M, Virginia Tech.

Do the math; that leaves Pitt, at best, No. 20. More realistically, Pitt belongs in a pool of, well, next-level programs, such as Arizona State, UCLA, California, Colorado, Maryland, North Carolina State, Wisconsin and Fiesta Bowl-foe Utah. Notice how those are similarly situated schools, in or around pro-sports cities.

Forget Miami and Pete Carroll's Southern California as major-metro models, though. Those programs sit on oil wells of talent -- a Harris aide once privately boasted that the Panthers would love to get Florida's 50th-best prospect every year -- and gobs of booster cash. Pitt's divergent path is evident when a former Hurricanes assistant and ex-NFL coach, Dave Wannstedt, pulls out of the running at his alma mater. Look at the rest of the publicly revealed Pitt candidates, and none carries a head coach resume such as Urban Meyer two years ago at Bowling Green or Dan Hawkins now at Boise State. Look at the salary, too: Meyer in Utah made about the same coin as Harris in Less-Than-Forbearing Oakland.

(By the way, the oasis Jamie Dixon and Ben Howland made of Pitt basketball is a mirage for football followers. It's much easier to recruit five to 10 good players and coach them into the top 10 or 20. And their recruiting base was not Western Pennsylvania or the Commonwealth at large, but New York.)

No, Next-20 Pitt football has to go the coordinator route.

That's fine. Pick a good one who recruits the heaven out of Western Pennsylvania and relates to administrators better than his predecessor, plus keeps a relative status quo with what he inherited. Harris' game decisions weren't excruciatingly worse than most other coaches, but his schedule was -- with Louisville, Cincinnati, Connecticut and South Florida now providing a lighter touch than Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College (the last two Harris beat with some regularity of late). Throw in Notre Dame, Nebraska and Michigan State on occasion, and the schedule isn't all drive-through windows to victory.

If he goes 8-3 and to a New Year's Day bowl, the new guy should be Big East Conference coach of the year.

Wait, isn't that precisely what helped the ex-coach buy The Farm?